This invention relates to a flour based dietetic cake mix. It further relates to a premix product that can be purchased in bulk quantities by commercial and institutional bakers and which is especially suited to be combined with high fructose corn syrup as the sweetener and other bulk ingredients, such as flour, and flavorings to be made into dietetic cakes. It is free of ordinary sugar, egg yolks and artificial sweeteners.
Dietetic and, especially, diabetic baked dessert foods, such as cake, chronically suffer from poor volume, texture, mouthfeel, taste, and, most notably, from insufficient natural sweetness. As used here, the word "dietetic" refers to foods for those people on a special diet, such as low cholesterol and sugar (sucrose) free diets. Further, "dietetic" means having one or more of the following characteristics or properties in a cake mix: (1) either the complete substitution of liquid shortening for hydrogenated shortening, or the lessening of the amount of hydrogenated shortening; (2) the use of egg whites and not egg yolks; (3) the substitution of fructose, especially in the form of high fructose corn syrup, for sucrose.
Sweeteners, including ordinary sugar (sucrose), saccharin, cyclamates, and sorbitol, and their combinations, all have some sort of undesirable attributes including after-taste, objectionable taste, side effects and potential harm to human health. For example, for some people saccharin has an unpleasant bitter metallic after-taste, and it has recently been proposed to be banned as a carcinogen. Sorbitol has only about one-half the sweetness of sucrose, but when consumed in moderate quantities can cause some people to suffer gastric discomfort and diarrhea. Sucrose must be used in such large amounts in order to impart the desired degree of sweetness that the product contains too many calories to make it suitable for consumption by persons on a diet. Further, sucrose is quickly metabolized, requiring insulin, which makes it generally unsuitable for diabetic use.
It has not to my knowledge been heretofore possible to provide an acceptable degree of sweetness in a dietetic cake without using non-nutritive artificial sweeteners, such as saccharin and cyclamates. My U.S. Pat. No. 3,658,553 describes the use of a combination of sorbitol (a nutritive sweetener) and saccharin in a dietary dry cake mix.
In recent years, some nutritionists and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration have from time to time expressed concern about the use of saccharin and cyclamates as food sweeteners. Such concern by the FDA has resulted in cyclamates and saccharin being banned, although there has been considerable debate over the medical basis for this action. The major concerns expressed about saccharin and cyclamates is whether they are detrimental to human health if consumed in large quantities over a long time.
In contrast to saccharin and cyclamates, fructose is a naturally occurring nutritive sweetener. It is a carbohydrate and has the same amount of calories per unit weight as another natural sugar, sucrose. Accordingly, it is believed to be as safe for human consumption as any natural food. Fructose tastes like ordinary common sugar, but is approximately 50 percent sweeter than sucrose and 150% sweeter than sorbitol. In fact, fructose is the sweetest natural sugar known. This relatively high level of sweetness allows less fructose to be required in many products with a corresponding reduction in sugar derived calories of about 20-80 percent. However, this is not true in products subjected to heat as fructose rearranges into a less sweet form when heated. Fructose varies in sweetness, depending on temperature, time, acidity and use. In heated products, fructose is generally in a less sweet form and in unheated products, it is in a sweeter form.
Compared to common sugar, fructose enters the blood stream at a relatively slow rate. In addition, fructose absorption, unlike that of either glucose or galactose, does not stimulate either glucagon from the gut or insulin from the pancreas. These and related properties are believed to enable fructose to be utilized in the body metabolism without having an adverse effect on glucose metabolism by which blood sugar is assimulated and metabolized into the body utilizing insulin. For these and other reasons which are not fully understood, studies have shown that fructose can be used in moderate amounts in the diet of persons having mild or well balanced diabetes without deleterious effects.
The relatively slow rate that fructose is absorbed and metabolized in the liver enhances the desirability of its use by the persons on a special diet since glucose is thereby released into the blood stream more evenly over an extended period of time to naturally control hunger.
Finally, because fructose is sweeter than common sugar, in some applications it can be used in smaller, more moderate, quantities in diets to provide the desired degree of sweetness with a corresponding reduction in the amount of sugar derived calories.
Heretofore, as described in my U.S. Pat. No. 4,185,127, my dietetic cake mixes utilized fructose in its crystalline form. While this is not a problem of great magnitude in prepackaged cake mixes for the retail market, crystalline fructose is expensive, and difficult to obtain by commercial and institutional bakers and difficult to use to produce an acceptable cake when it is available. Further, with energy costs rapidly increasing, it is becoming very expensive to ship bulk ingredients, such as crystalline fructose and flour, in completely prepackaged cake mixes to bakers all over the country.